skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It is not advocating a political position

From the OP: "I prefer Obama too."

That's a political position, pure and simple. In fact, it is as good as an endorsement (and a somewhat sneaky one given that it comes at the end of a seemingly innocuous survey -- oh, la di da, I was interviewing my friends about economic growth since we know about it, being "startup leaders" and all, and what do you know, most of us support Obama. Oh, and by the way, so do I.).
I've done one of these retreats, it's not a cult, and there are good reasons for those rules being in place. Philosophically I'm much more of a pragmatic dharma person, but if I decide to continue with my practice then I'll do a bunch more Goenka retreats before trying other stuff. If nothing else they're free, and you actually get really good results. I certainly don't agree with all of those rules in my everyday life, but on the retreat itself they are a huge part of the experience.

If you want to know more about the Goenka approach, there are a couple of really good podcasts from Buddhist Geeks:

http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2007/07/bg-028-entrepregurus-an...

http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2007/07/bg-029-mass-producing-m...

I think they're pretty much dead on in their analysis.
In short, "Google is working on Android 4.2 and have not been sitting on their collective thumbs for the past few months."

There's news like this every time some company is working on new versions of their smartphone operating systems. Consequently, that means there is always news like this, making it no longer news.
Machine Learning: The Power Of Simple Ensembles
They still haven't replicated it or taken a photo. It's just theoretical modelling.
Ever since the PS3 was hacked with a USB device causing a buffer overflow in the USB driver, I've been wondering how long it would be before someone discovered PCs were vulnerable to something similar. This just goes to show that security experts need to be involved in more aspects of hardware design.
Ron Paul would be more effective if he wasn't an ideologue.

Of course, he's really trying to be an effective fundraiser, not an effective lawmaker.
Seems like a bad idea to me. How will my browser do things such as autofill usernames and passwords, allow links to be opened in new tabs, block third-parties from tracking me with cookies, or allow me to globally change my font preferences if each web page actually uses a different "browser" that it downloaded, and whose only connection to the outside is IP and a framebuffer? Or how would a browser be able to give me crisper text on a Retina display with no change to web pages, or provide hardware-accelerated threaded scrolling, or let me play video with hardware-accelerated decoding?

(These are a few of the things that, as a browser engineer, I expect could not be done in this model.)

Also as a Mac user, I expect this would result in many forms in web pages giving me controls that look and act like Windows.

Against these likely disadvantages, the advantages seem slim. We already have good ways to distribute sandboxed native apps. The Web doesn't need to become one of them.
Come discover Electronic Dance Music at its best from artists you care about.
I highly recommend the book Passage Meditation by Eknath Easwaran.
According to this article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_insurance) there are about 20 companies who directly offer insurance. As you suggest, Lloyd's was first.

It turns out Orbcomm has had large losses before -- they collected $44M on a $50M claim a couple of years ago (http://www.spacenews.com/archive/archive09/orbcomm_0518.html)

Another tidbit from the last article: the form of deductible on such a policy.

"Orbcomm [...] said the insurance policy covering the six satellites includes a one-satellite deductible, a condition Orbcomm filled early this year when one of the spacecraft suffered a power failure."

A one-satellite deductible. Love it.
hahah - work time well spent
Petri Net Programming
Dick Costolo says being the ‘second screen’ is future of Twitter
Like this a lot, awesome work with this.

Some feedback:
When you have a photo being viewed and you click a thumbnail from the bottom or top rows, the picture changes, but the thumbnail disappears.

Also, when you do this the new picture renders not as smoothly.
I think there's a mix of bad mojo all around for the Flash player:

-It's a quite old codebase at this point(approaching 20 years)

-There's a huge amount of backwards compatibility expected - 11 major versions and counting

-The technology is not easily tamed - it's a whole suite of formats and protocols integrated together, each one of which has its own complexities.

-There's proprietary codecs in there, an open source player would be more expensive to support and reduce some strategy flexibility...which ties in with the last point...

-It's not the center of attention because historically the tool is making the real money, as parent states.

Adobe can still share plenty of blame for this, though. Even though they're in a monopoly position with most of their products, they are hesitant to make sweeping changes that can comprehensively address new needs - they opt to keep piling on features as long as possible and that is helping to contribute to exploitable bugs in both Acrobat and Flash. Even Photoshop has exploits, though they're less devastating since only some users frequently open PSD files.
WebRTC support landed in Firefox Nightly
I think this is less about IQ and more about culture. (And probably not even about looking down on other people.)
Leaders of ‘Traditional’ Online Learning Meet Upstart Free Providers
In one word, the digital content publishers and resellers need to tryst their consumers. Though you protect the digital content with DRM, smart consumers can use a special tool (how to remove DRM from iTunes for free http://dig4u.org/rip-drm/remove-drm-from-itunes-for-free.htm... )to 'hack' them.
That's also called stability. It means that Paypal has been successful enough to still be around after 5 years.
That is a description of a historical event, not an original work :) Like I said, mass collaboration works for some things, like recording facts. However, if you wanted to write about a fictional nuclear disaster for a video game you're developing, you'd likely be better off doing that by yourself or with a friend.
We've been using phantomjs, but it has it's issues too. I'm not sure there is a good solution anywhere in the open source world unfortunately - and tools like prince are expensive.
Poll: Area Man finds 2/3 of his friends share his political views

-- The Onion.
Shouldn't the title be "32 of Paul Graham's associates prefer Obama 2 to 1"?

Frankly I'm surprised he even took the time to ruminate on such a fundamentally biased poll.
After some further digging, it appears that insurance was at a low back in March. The article discusses the danger of a major failure, such as an Ariane 5 which could be covered at $750 million or a Proton which can carry $400 million worth of cargo. This $10 million loss shouldn't be too big of a deal for the space insurance world.

http://www.spacenews.com/satellite_telecom/120302-falling-sa...
English is the official language of India, no?
Customer Development: Should We Really Listen to Our Customers?
It's a standard that everyone knows because they have been bitten by it. :(

I was curious about it being limited to the UNIX world, and indeed, C# is the only C-like language that does not have this feature. On the UNIX side, even Go decided to keep them [0]. Python dropped them in v3 but I'm not sure if that counts as a UNIXy language or not...

[0] http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr...
Engineering is generally more social than law. From the minute you get to engineering school, it's all about working in groups. I was shocked to find out how much people in law school hated working in groups. They were humanities majors--they spent all of undergraduate writing papers by themselves instead of working on group projects. When I was an engineer, I had regular team meetings, talked with my team about design challenges every day, kept up correspondence with my customers' teams, etc. As a lawyer I might hole myself up in my office working on a brief for days at a time. My "team" might be three other people on a case who I touch base with once a week.

As for accounting being "less demanding on the brain" I think now you're just grasping at straws.
It is a sad day for computing when

- hackers can't read an RFC

- hackers don't know octal

- hackers can't trial-and-error an interesting behaviour until they see a pattern and learn for themselves.
A 15 Minute Call could save you 15 percent or more on ..... naaah doesnt work with the Satellite.
Whenever I hear terms like "vertical-oriented", I'm reminded of the managers at the big stagnant corporation I used to work at. Those terms sound just like "value proposition", "leveraging assets", and so on. They're not talking to developers or users, which are the people they need to focus on.

Case in point: I wanted to use PayPal to let users buy my apps, went through the x.com site, and quickly dropped it. Way too complex. Now Stripe on the other hand, that's something I'd really like to integrate with my apps.

I'm not saying PayPal can't possibly improve the situation, but they need to start talking to their customers in plain, simple language. What they're doing now is a red flag to me that I've seen in several other places, right before they were obsoleted and fizzled.
I wouldn't be surprised if these are good employees in a bad BU. Specifically PayPal seems to have abandoned online payments for POS/B&M (which is exponentially larger - think Stripe's size vs Square) Thus why I imagined (guessed) who might be excited to get the talent.
The problem is the size of the capital base you need to avoid gambler's ruin.
A Funny Portrait of Will Ferrell
Show HN: New brainstorming app that lets you fork ideas
I do believe you are much more on top of this than I. Thanks for the fine detailed clarification.
I'm not perceiving the news value here. California has never been in doubt as a state that will provide Electoral College votes to President Obama. (The same is true of Minnesota, where I live.) And anyone who knows California knows that the Bay Area is even more "blue" than greater Los Angeles, so what other election result would we expect in Silicon Valley? Now that I've commented, I should probably agree with my friends on Hacker News that posts about politics should be flagged ruthlessly.
I'd say this is a flaw of the "web" and relying on hyperlinking and "HTML forms" as a means to access all content. That's what web crawlers do.

Better would be putting databases on certain known ports, with no "hostname" requirements and let search engines scan IP ranges for openings on those ports. You send a ping to the port and if a "Welcome" response comes back, then you have a public database to explore. The response might even describe the contents of the database. (Yikes, I'm having flashbacks to gopher.)

What's funny is that "port scanning" is like the term "hacker" it has a negative connotation even though there's nothing inherently devious about it. Pinging a port to detect if there's a public database open on it is actually a more efficient less resource intensive means of service discovery than crawling hyperlinks in HTML generated by some web developer (maybe even one employed by a governemnt agency with a tight budget) hoping to stumble upon every possible data resource.
I couldn't believe it either, and left that place pretty quickly. I still talk to a lot of people that work there, and I get the feeling that they live in this bubble where they assume everything will work out for the best. To them, I'm just cynical.

I hope that this isn't the rule in most places, but I wouldn't know :/
if our universe were spun up or down like we do virtual machines, would we even notice?

I would guess not. See Permutation City by Greg Egan for lots of speculation about questions like that.
Well, I was predicting the past, not the future, although this post got 2 points (1 is mine)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314049

Here is the original:
http://arcanis.github.com/trivia.gol404/404.html

3% CPU max
"KS also has to find a milestone scheme where the money gets to the makers on an agreeable schedule"

not sure if KS wants to get into monitoring of project details and this idea is a hard one, because as organization making physical products you have big upfront expenses to pay like tooling and it requires the money early on.
Just a new form of the firewire DMA attack, right?
OAuth 2.0 finalized
Thats it. I am switching to Spartan Lower 1/2% milk
As a developer of a hardware project [1] that was funded on Kickstarter last year, I have to say that the real value is not the easily-reproduced payment infrastructure, but the eyeballs. A significant portion of our backers found the project through Kickstarter -- that's where people browse looking for something to spend money on.

I'm disappointed by Kickstarter's latest changes, however. What we did wouldn't be possible under the new rules.

[1] http://www.nonolithlabs.com/cee/
Pikacode: Git and mercurial hosting (and more)
LinkedIn Reveals the World’s Most In-Demand Employers
It's crazy seeing this, after just reading this

http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-f...
Feel free to leave your feedback :)
Haha, the 7% historic rate of satellites that failed to launch is not very far from my experience with the USPS' failed deliveries of postal packages to Australia.
Apple rethinking Samsung chip partnership, say sources
So, even the cutting edge of Googlers have bad taste in tech journalism.
Thought I feel sorry for the 400 people that might lose their jobs, I can't say the same of PayPal itself.

It's just another one of those companies that think profit is made with margins, and not with an actual product.
Without telling us the size of the data set that anecdote is meaningless. Other algorithms are _asymptotically_ better than bubble sort, i.e., when you get a certain amount of data, other algorithms perform significantly better. So this choice matters when the input can be arbitrarily large.

And it's false to say everything's disk/network bound these days. There will always be important data structures and other code that needs to scale, where the right algorithm makes the difference.
Grantoo Nabs $1.7M, Steals EA Canada CTO To Help Students Pay Tuition By...
I'm just curious what type of dev work you're doing, why did you take such below market pay without any equity? that's low for most types of dev with equity for someone with ten years experience
Nobody had to force law firms to try and increase their representation of women, at least in any systematic way. Law firms did it because lawyers are a very liberal bunch and demanded it from within.

I don't see why the same couldn't work for engineering. Would engineering companies have to dip into a slightly less talented pool to begin with? Probably. But here is an interesting statistic. At my alma mater, the entering men have about a 30-point higher average SAT math score than the entering women. Of course, the school has gotten more competitive over time, so the women entering today have about the same SAT math score as the men who entered as freshman in my class (about a decade ago). Think about that--the cohort of "affirmative action" women today have about the same level of mathematical aptitude (measured purely by test scores) as the cohort of experienced male engineers who are 5-6 years out from graduation. That's the magnitude of the thumb on the scale, and I'd argue it's very small.

I think the bottom line is this--there is no reason there should be fewer women in engineering than can be explained by any difference in aptitude of women for engineering. In terms of aptitude for engineering, the starkest difference we see is in standardized test scores, particularly the Math SAT. In the range that characterizes engineers from good schools (~700) the pool is ~40% women. That's the upper bound. I honestly think you could get an equilibrium in the engineering field with ~40% women, an equilibrium that would be stable, once established, with no affirmative action.
All plain text isn't edited or displayed in a fixed-width font. Proportional fonts are used in email, IM, and IRC applications, full screen writing applications, note taking applications, Markdown editors and some LaTeX editors, and text areas on websites. Many email applications display plain text messages in a proportional font and without collapsing spaces.

The two space convention originally became popular to match the practice of inserting wider spaces between sentences in print, but that has more or less fallen out of use.

In many ways, simple typographic conventions are also more esthetical. Does there need to be a distinction between spaces that separate words and spaces that separate sentences? The additional semantic markup isn't worth the extra complexity in many cases. Having two different conventions also adds complexity. Single spaces could eventually become the only format people need to know about, but two spaces couldn't.
You can be mindful of all of those things, but it's not necessarily the thing they start you off with with. Breath is easy to explain and locate... not everyone can isolate their heartbeat or eye movements easily.
Windows 8 Store won't allow PEGI 18-rated games
Probably because it sounds similar to a slur:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pikey
Tough to take their call seriously with the "Find us on Facebook" plugin directly to the right of their opening paragraph.
Falcon 9: 333,450 kg

Dragon: 4,200 kg

Cargo: 905 kg

Ice cream: <5 kg, I'm guessing

Skipping the ice cream would've reduced their total mass by <0.001% or so, at least at launchtime.
I think, most people confuse the internet with the web, so maybe the essence of the article should have been that the internet is "social" even without Facebook, Twitter etc. wich would be still a very similar statement.
Valve wants your help playtesting unreleased games and hardware prototypes
Tent.is gets a redesign
WebCam Mesh
WebCam Mesh maps images from your webcam to an adjustable, dynamic 3D surface, which allows you to do all sorts of fun things with your likeness. You can distort the colors, zoom around in space, dial the level of “3D-ness” up or down, and more.
You know what else is stable? Typewriters.
If you must drinks harmful to teeth, It would make sense to me to use a straw, and put the straw deep in you mouth so that the liquid does not come in contact with the teeth.
A Game of Life type visualization of this algorithm would be interesting. It might go something like:

The seed of the system is a random cluster of N stories (cells)
that represent the "front page".

Each cell has votes and topics (Erlang, Apple, X in CSS, etc.).

1. Any cell with fewer than N votes,
and fewer than two neighbors dies
(due to lack of interest and/or promotion).

2. Any cell with two or three live neighbors,
lives on to the next generation
(riding along the front page wave).

3. Any cell with more than three live neighbors,
that share the same topic dies
(due to overexposure of the topic).

4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors,
becomes a live cell with a topic shared by one of the neighbors
(the spread of interest of a topic).

After any generation, votes and stories can be added.

The low threshold of votes (N), is determined to be
some percentage of all votes in the system.

Tempted to make this for fun now...
Seriously. I still can't figure why anyone would believe that being ignored was proof you were on track to winning, but folks try to make the argument all the time.
About time the government gets to dictate how search results appear? or about time they spent tax dollars helping companies with mediocre products to rank better on Google? I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Rent time in an isolation tank. It is wonderful.
Google’s Schmidt: “What Apple Has Learned Is That Maps Are Really Hard”
Alan Kay: normal considered harmful
When I saw folks flagging this story, the soda/sugar/teeth story was exactly what I thought of. This story has far more to do with tech than basic dentistry writeups.
Ask HN: What startups are highly profitible but VCs won't touch?
In particular, what are some taboo areas that VCs in the valley tend not touch with a ten foot pole even though there may be a highly profitable business model and/or mass audience appeal?
Tiny MMOs, Massive Opportunities?
Look, I just picked up a soldering iron! My new hardware project is underway in only 2 seconds!!

Gotta love those Metcal irons!
Thanks for that.

I don't suppose you have other links to catastrophic risk insurance papers that are relatively interesting. I've always been interested in the industry from a far.
"... Here's a slightly less superficial version of the same article from CSIRO ..."

thx for finding this. There's always a balance between posting a general news article and the research source. The former is usually shallow, the later too deep.
WiOffer Raises the Bar in T-Commerce
CNNMoney explores T-Commerce (commerce via television) and how WiOffer is among the new wave of tech startups in the T-Commerce field.
In many ways, TypeScript is the "anti-Dash" (see leaked Dart memo). It builds on ES6. It does not inject novel runtime semantics. It just checks annotations _a la_ JSLint. Smart!
What The Heck Does “Traction” Really Mean To A VC?
https://www.outcrowding.com
Is this very common? Because that would certainly explain the behavior I see in games like WoW where turning my camera drops the framerate, but once I stop turning the framerate jumps back up to normal. I always assumed this had something to do with loading textures or models or geometry or something, but I was never really satisfied with that.
It's common to write foreign names in a slightly modified way matching the language used. This can be done to avoid uncommon character sets (you're going to write Moscow, not Москва), or simply because it sounds better in the sentence / people know how to read it (Warsaw, not Warszawa). Same happens with names.

Your comment sounds like there's something strange about adapting the name to the language currently used.
Scumbag.
This article is very pointless.
Those who follow/know rms know about his strict ideological beliefs about amazon and privacy in general, and those who don't follow rms are not really interested in what he has to say anyway.
That being said the article in itself doesn't contain much of valuable information to begin with.
I don't, I say it's part of the context of discovery (the way you come up with new hypotheses). On the other hand, you can't overlook the problem of induction, pure empiricism doesn't work. You need some theoretical framework before you can try to verify your hypotheses.
Bogus apps hijack Chrome, Tumblr
Agreed. The text of this article does not match the headline at all.
Yo. There's no proof that a great by-product produces a great product. Read the memo by Marc Andreessen about product-market fit. You can nail by-product and still miss the product. But of course, like Marc Andreessen said, it's popular for employers to champion "we care about our hires" (because who would do the opposite?)

Update: This post suffers from a cause-and-effect fallacy, and hindsight bias. More: http://times.jayliew.com/2012/10/12/cause-and-effect-fallacy...

So many developers are falling for this. Wake the F- up.

The irony: Zach doesn't realize he's talking like a pretentious Steve Jobs. Until you can prove cause and effect, please stop tricking developers. Yo.
Sheer speculation: porn and gambling.
Five things Facebook did this week
Ok, "was" -- but not "you", rather, "he" as in "where he was".

With "me" it's a question of "is". JS is used for purposes far beyond its original design limits. A victory condition and a call to evolution. ES6 is Ecma TC39's attempt to hit that target.
Who built Microsoft TypeScript and why
touche'...it's not the critic that counts...
It's an official language, along with Hindi.